Adam Sandler's low-brow Western The Ridiculous Six racked up more views during its first 30 days of availability than any other movie in Netflix's history, a designation that includes both the service's burgeoning original films and its licensed properties. "The Ridiculous Six, by way of example, in the first 30 days on Netflix it's been the most-watched movie in the history of Netflix," said Sarandos. "It's also enjoyed a spot at #1 in every territory we operate in, and in many of them it's still #1."

Sandler's gone from being the least successful star in theaters to the most successful in direct-to-video. It's not really a big shift.

There are any number of factors to get it more views than other movies: Netflix promoted it endlessly, and unlike the vast majority of movies on Netflix, it was a movie nobody had seen before. So they're essentially getting the people who would have watched it in the theater and the people who would have waited for video, in the same dip.

Plus, that bit in the first graf about "the company's expansion to over 130 new countries" -- I'm guessing Netflix's huge multinational expansion meant that the most-watched movie this month was bound to be the most-watched movie ever, because Netflix has more subscribers now than it has ever had.

Also, I am sure a nonzero number of people started watching it because they got confused and thought it was the new Tarantino movie.

Adam Sandler's low-brow Western The Ridiculous Six racked up more views during its first 30 days of availability than any other movie in Netflix's history, a designation that includes both the service's burgeoning original films and its licensed properties. "The Ridiculous Six, by way of example, in the first 30 days on Netflix it's been the most-watched movie in the history of Netflix," said Sarandos. "It's also enjoyed a spot at #1 in every territory we operate in, and in many of them it's still #1."

The $60 million movie, a comedy take on classic westerns like The Magnificent Seven, has been branded ‘unwatchable’ by critics and viewers alike.Netflix have removed the Western from their main carousel in exchange for Bradley Cooper rom-com Aloha, which definitely means the situation must be very bad indeed.

Adam Sandler's low-brow Western The Ridiculous Six racked up more views during its first 30 days of availability than any other movie in Netflix's history, a designation that includes both the service's burgeoning original films and its licensed properties. "The Ridiculous Six, by way of example, in the first 30 days on Netflix it's been the most-watched movie in the history of Netflix," said Sarandos. "It's also enjoyed a spot at #1 in every territory we operate in, and in many of them it's still #1."

The $60 million movie, a comedy take on classic westerns like The Magnificent Seven, has been branded ‘unwatchable’ by critics and viewers alike.Netflix have removed the Western from their main carousel in exchange for Bradley Cooper rom-com Aloha, which definitely means the situation must be very bad indeed.

For the sake of my sanity I'm going to choose to believe that your link is the more accurate one.

For as much as people hate Adam Sandler's movies and I'm no exception, the problem, as someone who has worked at a theatre for basically the last 12 years sees it, is that he is almost always profitable. Even backburner movies of his that fly mostly under the radar like Click make 284 million on a 98 million production budget.

Basically he make movies that average about 280 to 300 percent profit almost perfectly. Like its kinda fucking insane how you can look at most of his movies find the production cost and times it by 3 and that is generally (with a few exception of course) how much it made at box office. That's not even getting into video sales, which his movie do very well in. While that might look like shit on a weekly box office report, and while that might make it look like his movies are flops when they go up against 800 million dollar Marvel titles in the summer, its safe as fuck for a studio to make a movie you can almost guarantee will make you profit and he will ALWAYS have work.

It boils down to the fact that he has a very strong hold on the 'family movie but not cartoons' market, even if most of his movies are raunchy and fucking despicable.

Büge wrote:Then there was all that negative publicity about the film when they refused to cut out horrible racist jokes and the Native American cast walked off the set.

I haven't seen it but the AV Club review suggests the final product is actually really bland and inoffensive.

There were reports during production of Native American actors walking off set after their complaints about demeaning or racist jokes were ignored; this may account for the final film’s relatively good-natured attitude toward its Native American characters, but it’s there nonetheless. The Apache tribe that raises Sandler’s character is depicted as a supportive and honorable, with many more of the jokes coming at the expense of white dudes.

One of the reviews quoted in Geo's link suggests otherwise:

@AdamSandler The inaccuracies in Native American culture in #TheRidiculousSix are nothing to laugh about. #MoreThanAFew of us are offended.

— Winny Simon (@muddererth) December 11, 2015

but the trouble with one-sentence reviews of controversial products is that it's hard to tell if the reviewer actually saw it or is just responding to the controversy.

(I am not suggesting that the movie is good. Just that I've seen people suggest that the earlier controversy seems to have led to most of the racism being removed from the final cut.)

Spooky Skeleton wrote:How can that article AND this article both exist?

Well, because one of them is quoting the CEO of Netflix -- who has a bias in favor of putting a positive spin on the straight-to-Netflix Sandler movies (of which there are still three more which Netflix has already paid for) -- and the other is a month-old article from a UK gossip site whose research consists of looking at Netflix's homepage and some user reviews.

The $60 million movie, a comedy take on classic westerns like The Magnificent Seven, has been branded ‘unwatchable’ by critics and viewers alike.

Poor critical reception is not, inherently, a barrier to financial success. I could make a list of examples, but instead I'm just going to link to Michael Bay's IMDb page.

Netflix have removed the Western from their main carousel in exchange for Bradley Cooper rom-com Aloha, which definitely means the situation must be very bad indeed.

This sentence is a crime against journalism, logic, and the English language. Fuck the person who wrote it, fuck the publication that printed it, and fuck the British press.

"Which definitely means the situation must be very bad indeed" -- no, it does not definitely mean that. Just saying something definitely means something is not an argument. It is not supporting evidence. It is making conjecture and then dressing it up as irrefutable fact.

Is there any alternative hypothesis for why Netflix might remove a film from its carousel after three days? The author does not produce one, because why would you when your existing hypothesis is definite? But here, I'll come up with one right now: Netflix changes out the movies in its carousel every three days.

Is that definite? No, but it's a testable hypothesis. Let's see. Today I'm seeing Making of a Murderer, Family Guy, and Sherlock at the top of my Netflix homepage. My wife's has Battle Creek, Cutthroat Kitchen, and The Great Food Truck Race Collection. Oh, would you look at that? Different people don't even get the same carousel.

Let's check back in three days and see if those carousels are still the same, or if those shows have been replaced with different ones (which definitely means the situation must be very bad indeed).

Grath wrote:For the sake of my sanity I'm going to choose to believe that your link is the more accurate one.

Hastings could be full of crap and exaggerating the popularity of a poorly-received movie to try and salvage other movies he's already on the hook for.

HOWEVER, the Metro article is, and I cannot stress this enough, the worst piece of entertainment journalism I have seen since a UK tabloid printed what it claimed was an interview with Britney Spears's husband but which quoted him using words like "gobsmacked" and "mum". If you read that article and think "Wow, this is a well-researched, factually-based piece" then you do not know how to tell the difference between accurate reporting and making shit up and then looking at the Netflix homepage to cherry-pick a few details to (poorly) support said made-up shit.

The Verge article comes across as the more reliable article just by default. Because the Metro article is terrible in every conceivable way. It is the journalistic equivalent of an Adam Sandler movie.

Joxam wrote:For as much as people hate Adam Sandler's movies and I'm no exception, the problem, as someone who has worked at a theatre for basically the last 12 years sees it, is that he is almost always profitable. Even backburner movies of his that fly mostly under the radar like Click make 284 million on a 98 million production budget.

Profitable, yes, but decreasingly so; Forbes put him at the top of its most-overpaid list (as in, highest ratio of pay for a star to profit from the movie) in both 2013 and 2014, and he may very well top the 2016 list too. (Forbes's breakdowns are based on the fiscal year; Pixels is part of fiscal 2016, not 2015. In case anyone's wondering, Johnny Depp topped the 2015 list.)

He's in that spot where he still puts asses in seats but not as many as he used to, which is why the Netflix deal makes good sense: studios don't see him as a good investment anymore, compared to their other options, but Netflix sees him as a good investment compared to its other options. Like I said, there's not really much of a disconnect between being at the low end of theatrical films and the high end of direct-to-video ones.

Put another way: Ridiculous 6 going straight to Netflix represents a demotion for Sandler. That (Netflix claims) he's doing very well in his newly-demoted position doesn't mean he's a runaway success; it just means that the bar for a successful straight-to-Netflix movie is much lower than the bar for a successful theatrical release.

Joxam wrote:For as much as people hate Adam Sandler's movies and I'm no exception, the problem, as someone who has worked at a theatre for basically the last 12 years sees it, is that he is almost always profitable. Even backburner movies of his that fly mostly under the radar like Click make 284 million on a 98 million production budget.

Profitable, yes, but decreasingly so; Forbes put him at the top of its most-overpaid list (as in, highest ratio of pay for a star to profit from the movie) in both 2013 and 2014, and he may very well top the 2016 list too. (Forbes's breakdowns are based on the fiscal year; Pixels is part of fiscal 2016, not 2015. In case anyone's wondering, Johnny Depp topped the 2015 list.)

He's in that spot where he still puts asses in seats but not as many as he used to, which is why the Netflix deal makes good sense: studios don't see him as a good investment anymore, compared to their other options, but Netflix sees him as a good investment compared to its other options. Like I said, there's not really much of a disconnect between being at the low end of theatrical films and the high end of direct-to-video ones.

Put another way: Ridiculous 6 going straight to Netflix represents a demotion for Sandler. That (Netflix claims) he's doing very well in his newly-demoted position doesn't mean he's a runaway success; it just means that the bar for a successful straight-to-Netflix movie is much lower than the bar for a successful theatrical release.

What I'd heard was that Johnny Depp topped the 2015 list because of Adam Sandler's move to Netflix Original movies.

Half in the Bag has a pretty good teardown of the Adam Sandler production model. Asses in the seats - and thus, actual movie quality - are kind of irrelevant, the movie's profitable before it's even released because of the constant product placement.

のほも is such a good word?? the concept is kind of hard to fully get across in translation, but basically it means a feeling of pure, deep, platonic affection, and i think thats beautiful

Grath wrote:What I'd heard was that Johnny Depp topped the 2015 list because of Adam Sandler's move to Netflix Original movies.

I don't see how that's possible given that Sandler's first Netflix Original movie was released after the cutoff date for the list.

But it's why Sandler probably won't be making the list for 2017.

(2016 is still possible, since, like I said, Pixels was released in fiscal 2016. Then again, Cobbler was fiscal 2015 and not, in and of itself, enough to put him on the list.)

Friday wrote:Yeah, caught that awhile back. Sandler knows how to make money, and good for him for doing it, I guess. He's pure horseshit at this point when it comes to anything else, though.

I've heard he takes good care of his friends, and given that his last few years' worth of output is mostly just excuses for him to take his friends on expensive vacations at studios' expense, I believe it. He seems like a nice enough guy.

But as far as putting out anything that I've enjoyed, well, he hasn't done that this century.

Stranger Things is a delight; the only other show in recent memory that's hooked me like this is Fargo. (And mmmmmaybe the first season of True Detective.)

It's a pastiche of '80's movies, mainly ET and Poltergeist but with some Goonies and some John Hughes and a little bit of Evil Dead and so on. And it's perfect; it's one of those pastiches that's as good as you remember the original stuff being and better than it actually was.

It's got Winona Ryder and Matthew Modine and a bunch of people I've never heard of. It's one of those shows that's got such a fantastic crop of child actors that it makes every show and movie with bad child actors look stupid.

I've got one episode to go, and I think it's been renewed for another season already.

Thad wrote:It's a pastiche of '80's movies, mainly ET and Poltergeist but with some Goonies and some John Hughes and a little bit of Evil Dead and so on. And it's perfect; it's one of those pastiches that's as good as you remember the original stuff being and better than it actually was.

Nailed it. Throw in some Close Encounters (or everything Spielberg before he got old and rote.) It was all we could do to ration the thing to an ep or two a night. I wish there were more, but eight episodes was exactly right for telling this story with a minimum of false tension and dicking around. Just skipping the setup and resolution of empty commercial break cliffhangers would probably at least halve the length of any show (there are plenty of cliffhangers, but they fall where they need to, not at the designated time for selling dish soap.) It's the kind of TV writing that never could have existed five or ten years ago, and from an interview I saw with the guys it was apparently rejected more than a dozen times before they shopped it to Netflix. Apparently the consistent exec criticism was that it either needed to be an Eerie Indiana-ish show that focused on the kids, or a supernatural police procedural focused on the cop. Those aren't terrible ideas, but they sure are boring, safe ones that we've seen the fuck out of before now. Also, way to get some child actors that don't make me want to bite off my tongue and bleed to death. Even better that they get some kids with actual personality and write with that in mind. It starts off strong, but it's noticeable that they begin writing more for the individual actors a couple episodes in.

So yeah, add my endorsement to the list. It's easily the best TV I've seen in years.

My only complaint: You don't roll a d20 for a fireball in 1st edition AD&D.

"Hey, boss? Some guy who knows fuckall about anything called in a missing kid report." "KILL HIM IMMEDIATELY."

Yeah, I know one faked suicide is easy and a bunch will bring in the feds, but holy hell everything about Hopper's personal history and lifestyle screamed suicide/accidental overdose. Try to tell me his coworkers wouldn't have believed it.

Sharkey wrote:Throw in some Close Encounters (or everything Spielberg before he got old and rote.)

And a whole lot of Aliens at the end.

Sharkey wrote:It was all we could do to ration the thing to an ep or two a night. I wish there were more, but eight episodes was exactly right for telling this story with a minimum of false tension and dicking around.

Yeah, what really struck me around the middle of the series was that okay, they've gone with the trope of the characters splitting up into four different factions and each looking into the mystery isolated from the rest, nobody communicating with each other -- but they manage to pace it just right so that there's always a sense of progress and it never feels like they're drawing it out. The characters' motivations make sense, and it makes sense why, say, Mike doesn't go straight to Joyce and tell her what he's seen and heard.

Sharkey wrote:My only complaint: You don't roll a d20 for a fireball in 1st edition AD&D.

And why is He-Man on when the kids are at school? That's a stupid time to schedule a kids' show (says the guy who was late every day to first grade because Thundercats ended at the same time school started).

There were a few bits where I caught myself thinking, "Wait, I don't think people said 'douchebag' in 1983," but never anything quite so glaringly anachronistic as that time on Mad Men when somebody said "1960, I am so over you."

"Hey, boss? Some guy who knows fuckall about anything called in a missing kid report." "KILL HIM IMMEDIATELY."

Yeah, I know one faked suicide is easy and a bunch will bring in the feds, but holy hell everything about Hopper's personal history and lifestyle screamed suicide/accidental overdose. Try to tell me his coworkers wouldn't have believed it.

I made that exact complaint, yes.

There were also a couple of occasions where the passage of time made no sense ("Wait, how long has she been standing there while all those other scenes were occurring?", "How did group X get there before group Y," etc.), but that kind of plothole actually feels kind of welcome as a genre trope.

Where people are and what they're doing while other people are doing something else is pretty muddy in a few places. I didn't notice anything overtly wrong with it, other than a few occasions where I wondered what kind of nothing one character or another must have been up to for a while. Everything else is cinemasins fiddling bullshit. I don't think the story would be improved if the kid threw 1d6 for each experience level of the caster and the Demogorgon got a saving throw.

If we wanted to be really accurate the show would have been eight hours of these kids arguing about thac0. And I would watch it.

The little white/black dot imperfections in the film used here and there on top of the light haze in the title sequence was a nice touch. Also apparently they got a truckload of surplus Tron soundtrack and layed that out like fresh shag carpet.

And now, plot related commentary, which is out of order.Science teacher award of the year for that guy.

Oh god no that is an egg remains you motherfuckers you are tacking Alien onto this. The one movie from that time period I can't quite handle.... GIVE ME MORE.

These fucking school buildings are unrealistic. They are going in and out of the gym. Those lock behind you. I don't think Sheriff unlocked every one of these.

You roll a 17 and you banish your ex-husband from the rest of the series. Seriously expected him to pop his head back up in the pursuit of money.

These kids on bikes can follow/chase other cars enough to tail them to the quarry? WTF?

These kids on bikes can outrun vans? Hmm, using terrain to the advantage, I'll give them this one. Oh. That van. Okay. Complaint withdrawn.

I honestly expected this to play out like a Lovecraft story and end less-than-ideal or just discover the horror is worse than imagined. Barb didn't make it, so that's still a partial 'The Darkness Grows' end. That and oh shit that's some alien slug shit in the sink. Everyone is doomed.

I'm hoping somewhere there's some 'making of' footage that discusses where they got all this period accurate 80s shit or if they just collectively emptied out the attic/basement of everyone in their 30s/40s until they had enough stuff.